In the manufacturing industry, many different types of material are transported and used from rolls. In the factory, these rolls must be moved to proper locations and then mounted on various types of machinery for unwinding the material. For example, rolls of paper are fed out and processed to construct many products, including boxes and paper tubes. The rolls of paper can be quite large including sizes of 8" width paper on 70" diameter rolls and weigh anywhere up to 400-500 lbs.
These rolls have center holes and are typically mounted via the center hole on stands to be fed out. Many known stands allow rolls to be mounted on a roll bar which is simply a horizontally mounted bar for receiving the center hole of the roll. For the material to unwind without obstruction, the roll bar must be located far enough off the ground so a full roll does not contact any surface which would prevent its unwinding. Therefore, in common use, a worker must carry or transport or even roll the roll over to the stand and then physically lift the roll onto the roll bar. With rolls of varying sizes and weight, this is an incredibly strenuous operation and can easily result in back strains or other injuries. Often, the roll is so heavy that a mechanical assistance device such as a ramp, forklift or jack must be used to lift the roll far enough up and get it onto the stand roll bar. However, even with mechanical assistance, mounting the roll onto the roll bar is a slow, cumbersome and difficult operation. Production runs suffer as set up time increases.
Another problem is that many manufacturing techniques require many rolls of material to supply material simultaneously. For example, in paper tube construction, a plurality of strips of paper are glued and then pressed together in a circular overlapping roll, which produces a continuous paper tube which may then be cut to size. A number of strips of paper must be simultaneously drawn off of different rolls to be combined in the manufacturing process. Accordingly, roll stands are often manufactured to support a plurality of rolls. These multiple roll stands all suffer from the same problems as individual roll stands, including the difficulty of loading rolls onto the roll stands and the inability of roll stands to support rolls of various sizes and shapes.
In manufacturing paper tubes the rolls must be disposed in close proximity to one another. Multiple roll stands also suffer the disadvantage that the rolls are typically disposed parallel to one another. Consequently, multiple roll stands take up a lot of space on a manufacturing floor. Known in-line stands require manual lifting of the roll, and typically are configured so that rolls can not be placed in close proximity to one another.